The recent merger of California-based software companies Oracle and PeopleSoft — which writes Northwestern’s CAESAR software — will not adversely effect any of NU’s management software, according to an NU technology official.
Oracle announced Dec. 13 that it had finalized a deal to acquire PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion, ending an 18-month long struggle that included a federal anti-trust lawsuit and several rejected offers, including Oracle’s initial $5.1 billion hostile takeover bid.
Early in the endeavor, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison worried PeopleSoft customers — including NU, which uses PeopleSoft Enterprise 8 to run CAESAR and its Human Resources Information System — by announcing plans to discontinue PeopleSoft’s product lines, offering no future upgrades and only a finite period of “enhanced” customer support.
Oracle has since retreated from that stance, promising to release next-generation editions of PeopleSoft’s major applications and offering 10 years of support options for current PeopleSoft products, according to its Web site.
The Web site states that Oracle plans to release a “successor product set,” a hybrid of Oracle and PeopleSoft applications that would ideally combine the best aspects of both systems. The company has promised to develop a migration strategy to ease the transition from older applications to the successor set.
“We’re looking at this in a positive light,” NU’s Director of Management Systems Betty Brugger said, explaining that both CAESAR and HRIS already run on Oracle databases. “We see the merger of the two companies as bringing those two technologies together, the application side and the database side.”
Brugger said that earlier, Oracle unnerved the majority of higher education institutions with its apparent disregard for PeopleSoft’s customers, but she said the company has shown a change in attitude.
“They sound genuine that they will continue to support us,” she said.
In July 2003 Brugger had predicted that the merger had the potential to cost NU “millions.”
But with Oracle agreeing to allow PeopleSoft users to upgrade their software free of licensing fees, that looming financial burden has been lifted.
The Higher Education User Group, a collection of universities that use PeopleSoft applications, including Northwestern, initially fought against the merger.
However, according to the group’s Vice President of Communications Thomas Scott, that is now “a moot point.”
“We were an independent users group then, and we are an independent users group now,” he said, adding that as the merger has been finalized, the group will work with Oracle to express members’ concerns.
Reach Jordan Weissmann at [email protected].
